Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage in Tucker, GA

Chimney Leaks & Storm Damage for Tucker Homeowners

Tucker has an unusually high proportion of long-tenure ownership, and that produces a particular kind of chimney. Houses in Smoke Rise, Idlewood and around Main Street are largely 1950s to 1970s, frequently still with the family that bought them or their children, and the fireplaces have been used continuously for decades. That is a lot of accumulated burning through a single flue. The systems are generally well built and the masonry is often sound, but the interiors carry the history — glazed creosote from years of slow, smouldering fires is a more common find in Tucker than almost anywhere else on our patch.

1950s-1970s housing with long-tenure ownership and decades of continuous fireplace use; glazed creosote is the characteristic finding.

A chimney is the only part of a roof that is deliberately full of holes, and in a climate that delivers as much rain as Atlanta does, the odds catch up with it. Water gets in at four places: a cracked crown, failed flashing where the stack passes through the roof, a missing or damaged cap, and brickwork that has become porous enough to drink. The difficulty is that the stain inside the house rarely appears under the actual entry point — water tracks down the outside of the flue and shows up a storey below. Sealing where the stain is achieves nothing, which is why people end up paying for the same leak three times.